There are no closing bells or farewell parties for summertime.

In the homeschooling home, where structures of time and space have flexible boundaries, it can be difficult to discern transitions. In spite of this, we try to make a clear contrast between summertime and the rest of the year. Making this distinction has been the sweetest gift for me as a homeschooling mother. There are natural rhythms in nature such as gardening, haying time, preserving the harvest, and new baby barnyard animals, and we attempt to allow for those rhythms to fill our days.

Homeschooling is an extension of the home, and so it flexes to the needs and curiosities of the people who inhabit it. For our home in the summer, we have a mixture of structure and unstructured time in our day. There’s a definite end to our homeschool group, but other activities continue. Like many homes, we plan to settle into the relaxed days of summer, taking a break from all subjects. We do, however, incorporate copy writing (improves their handwriting and creative writing skills) and Bible memory work (a loner passage which we may not have time for during the year – this year, we are memorizing John 14 ). The children also continue weekly music lessons. Our family also functions better when we keep daily disciplines of regular meal times, Bible reading, chores, family read-aloud, and bedtimes.

One of the beauties of summer is to allow for wide and welcoming boundaries of time for the children’s own pleasure – an invitation to re-create and enjoy time. Some summers we take trips, and some years we have newborns, and swim lessons, and outings to Barns and Noble. The single thread through all of our summers has been reading. Books have certainly been the highlight of our summer activities. We pick up loads of picture books, fiction and non-fiction from the library, and you will find books in our car, in our bags, and in every room of our home.

In an upcoming post, we’re sharing the best book series for summer!

with love, Damaris